By the end of the 16th century, Europeans believed nutmeg was a panacea of almost miraculous efficacy. Andrew Borde, the author of a popular English medical guide, Dyetary of Helth, wrote: "Nutmeges be good for them which have cold in their head and doth comforte the syt and the brain" and that they were "good against the blody flux", the deadly end-product of dysentery.
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutchman who had spent nine years in the East Indies, the original home of the nutmeg tree (Myristica fragrans), testified that "nutmegs fortify the brain and sharpen the memory . . . give a clean breath, force the urine, stop diarrhoea, and cure upset stomachs".
Others claimed that nutmeg was a powerful aphrodisiac. But it was when Elizabethan physicians praised the fruit's aromatic seed as the only certain cure for the plague that nutmeg became, in Giles Milton's words, "as sought after as gold". A pennyworth of nutmeg at the faraway source could be sold in London for 50 shillings, a mark-up of 60,000 per cent.
Thus began the fierce international competition to dominate the trade in nutmeg. Fortunes were gambled to send small ships vast distances across sometimes stormy seas to "The Spiceries", of which the Banda Islands, between Java and New Guinea, were the richest in nutmeg, and Run Island was the richest of all.
English merchant adventurers established the East India Company (1999 is its 400th anniversary) to share the spice trade's immense profits, which more than compensated them, financially, for the frequent losses of ships and men.
England's main rival was Holland, which proved much more dangerous than Spain and Portugal. Indeed, the Dutch East India Company eventually won the war for The Spiceries, and the original East India Company withdrew to India, to set itself up as the first governing body of the British Raj.
Giles Milton, who studied at the University of Bristol (a city with an old tradition of merchant adventuring), specialises in the history of exploration, and has done a thorough job of research in the contemporary diaries and letters that record the story of "The Spice Race". He writes of the merciless rapacity of 17th-century fortune-hunters with zest and wit that made his book a well-deserved hit at last autumn's Frankfurt Book Fair.
He wisely chose to focus on one pre-eminent hero in his cast of thousands. Nathaniel Courthope, until now forgotten, commanded an English garrison of only 30 men and, amazingly, held the small island of Run for five years against a Dutch military force almost 100 times as large. Run's native population, hating the Dutch, formally ceded Run to the English crown.
"Courthope's resistance was heroic, and foolhardy," Milton has commented in an interview. "He did it for no personal gain. He keeps talking about acting for king and country; he really seems to have believed that this island was rightfully British, and that therefore he would fight to the last man."
Courthope's patriotic stubbornness and the written title to the island resulted in an extraordinary quirk of diplomacy after his death. Because the Dutch had succeeded in fortifying all the other Banda islands, they were determined to complete their occupation. In negotiations for the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Breda, England agreed to let Holland have Run - in exchange for New Amsterdam.
Milton's enthralling story of nutmeg culminates in the story of how New Amsterdam became New York. In one of many curious and elegant asides, there is an etymological footnote. It seems that when Henry Hudson and his fellow navigators put ashore on the island now called Manhattan they shared strong drink with their Native American hosts. It is said the name Manhattan is derived from the Indian word manahactanienk, meaning "the island of general intoxication".